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Dutch government faces collapse over child benefits scandal
This reminds me of the Concentrix tax credits palaver from a few years back. Needless to say, our scandal didn’t result in any notion that the government might be held responsible….
The Dutch government will decide on Friday whether to step down over an escalating scandal in which tax officials wrongly accused thousands of parents of fraud, plunging many families into debt by ordering them to repay childcare allowances.
The opposition Labour party leader, Lodewijk Asscher, who was social affairs minister in the previous government, resigned over the affair on Thursday, denying he knew the tax authority was “wrongly hunting down thousands of families” but conceding a failing system had “made the government an enemy of its people”.The MPs’ report, titled Unprecedented Injustice, was published last month after an inquiry into the childcare benefits scandal that included public questioning of officials up to and including Rutte.
It established that “fundamental principles of the rule of law were violated” by the Dutch tax authority, with fraud investigations into families triggered by “something as simple as an administrative error, without any malicious intent”.
The investigating committee chairman, Chris van Dam, called the system “a mass process in which there was no room for nuance”, with some 20,000 working families pursued for fraud before the courts, ordered to repay child support benefits and denied the right to appeal over several years from 2012.
Some were pushed close to bankruptcy or forced to move house by unjust claims for tens of thousands of euros when the alleged fraud amounted to an incorrectly filled-out form or a missing signatures. Several couples separated under the strain.
There’s more here Dutch government faces collapse over child benefits scandal
Going going gone…
“The government was not up to standard throughout this whole affair,” [the Prime Minister] told a press conference. “Mistakes were made at every level of the state, with the result that terrible injustice was done to thousands of parents.”
Political responsibility for the scandal lay with the current cabinet, he said, which had decided collectively that it had no option but to resign. “Things cannot ever be allowed to go so terribly wrong again ...”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/dutch-government-resigns-over-child-benefits-scandal
It does illustrate how UK governments don’t accept responsibility for scandals on their watch. The outsourcing of services (such as to Concentrix) is also a great way for governments to shift blame onto their contractor.
If you can translate from Dutch, here is a Wikipedia article from a Dutch lawyer friend. The scandal is similar to what we’ve has to put up with in the UK. https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeslagenaffaire
Two good articles in English here:
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/01/the-childcare-benefits-scandal-voices-of-the-victims/
And just in case anyone thinks the UK is the only place with a punitive means test, I also found this article about gifts of groceries being counted as income in The Netherlands: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/01/benefits-shopping-scandal-prompts-new-draft-legislation/